A nation with unfinished business can take inspiration from Mabo
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I see Eddie Mabo as a man for all seasons but one drawn magnetically to the season of hope. Being banished from Mer in the Murray Islands, standing before court and being expelled at the age of 16 for drinking alcohol, might have broken many young men.
Poverty, rejection and alienation crushes most young people. Look deeper into the over-incarceration of young Indigenous men and women and the loss of hope expressed in so many suicides and you find family crisis, the early death of a parent, domestic violence, foetal alcohol syndrome, drugs or abuse.
A season for hope … Eddie Mabo, a role model for a nation with unfinished business. Credit:The Age
Yet the name Eddie Koiki Mabo, now enshrined in law and in legend, shines brightly in the longer timelines of the history of this land. Mabo can show Australians how to make the most of our unique opportunities, how to blend the ancient strengths of many cultures and the human creativity of our modern diversity to write one of the world’s most hopeful narratives in the 21st Century.
The racial supremacy implicit in the doctrine of terra nullius had allowed settlers to look right through the First Peoples, to pretend that Eddie Mabo’s people were not really here, that they had not nurtured this land for countless millennia and so were not fully human. This exclusion was made explicit in the Australian constitution and the deep stain of that racism remains in the document today.
Article source: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/angry-anderson-s-son-killed-in-bloody-northern-beaches-attack-20181104-p50dwn.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed
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